On Wed, 23 Nov 2005, charles matthews wrote:
"Geoff Burling" write
Wikipedia is not only reinventing the idea of an encyclopedia but also the (excuse me) paradigm of academia
Is that the right comparison? I thought we were doing 'distance learning', really. Hey, if we offered degrees in two weeks, like other Florida institutions, we could charge enough to buy servers ...
I'm sorry, Charles that I didn't see your response sooner. For some reason the subject line on this thread got changed, then when I looked in the WikiEN-L archives, I couldn't find any trace of my original post -- probably because I misremembered the name on the thread.
But to answer your question. Originally, when I spoke of "acadmia", I was thinking of the model some of my professors presented of their profession, which was one where they & their peers were engaged in an ongoing dialogue over important topics or new findings; the education of young minds or certifying their credentials was merely a secondary, but necessary, part of performing the first task. I think this is covered, after a fashion, by the saying "publish or perish".
(For the record some of my other professors did not embrace this model, but only a few seemed to show that their first interest was to teach.)
But as I started to write this delayed response, I remembered one aspect of Wikipedia tht seems to get overlooked, its opportunity for hands-on education. Or maybe I'm the only person to notice that to write a useful article on a subject, one needs to know how to research, to distill what is found, then to write about it in a clear & readable manner. And the dynamics of a Wiki provides fairly quick feedback whether one has achieved those goals: contributing to Wikipedia has a number of similarities to an ongoing education program.
Of course there is the perennial problem of the stereotype of an immature 15-year-old, who argues with experts over subects he doesn't understand. To this, all I can say that if the expert is guilty of making hasty generalizaions without supporting citations or clear writing, then who is the immature party in the dispute? Sometimes I forget that there are kooks on Wikipedia who will argue with anyone over data & conclusions that they don't agree with, but these kooks are everywhere; we somehow make an unconscious assumption that because they have a computer, they are somehow more of a threat than the bore next to you at a bar who insists he alone has the solution to all of our problems.
Geoff